I think it's a jellyfish. It's a bit of a wild stab-in-the-dark but I guess that maybe during the year a JAMSTEC researcher has discovered a new species of glowing jellyfish that they think looks a bit like a Christmas tree.

JAMSTEC has long been an agency specialized in deep-sea exploration with special vehicles for wildlife as well as for geology. Climate research is a relative newcomer which was shaped in the aftermath of a strong El Nino event in 1982-1983. And it became relative majority in terms of number of researchers when our "global change" programs started in 1997. But in terms of permanent employees, deep-sea exploration technology is still the majority, and it seems that the identity of the agency lies there.

Nice idea, but dollars to curry doughnuts says it is just the inappropriate rendering of "r" in place of "l", as they are indistinguishable in Japanese script :-)

Jellyfish is indeed eaten here, so its appearance is only to be expected in the list you linked (note that despite the .ca address, the info is directly sourced from Japan which explains the same spelling mistake).

Masuda-san,

Interesting - I didn't realise JAMSTEC had been involved in climate science for so long. One would think that after 20 years they could easily have established a functional research program and institute, had they any intention of doing so :-) The Hadley Centre was only inaugurated in 1990.

As I know, JAMSTEC's climate-related research started as El-Nino-related ocean expedition in 1987. It gradually evolved as observational task forces in TOGA (Tropical Ocean & Global Atmosphere) and WOCE (World Ocean Circulation Experiment). But, before 1997 when FRSGC started, JAMSTEC seemed just an operator of research vessels and a horde of technicians. It did have a few teams of scientists, but they seemed minor (i.e. without much social power) compared with technitians within JAMSTEC and minor compared with university professors among scientists. This is a (then) outsider's perhaps biased view.